Tag: butter

How long do you think it took me to start baking cut out cookies from the day I bought a couple of sets of beautiful cookie cutter shapes? Two years. Is this normal, or is it just me, looking at them every time I open the drawer and thinking that one day, I will use them for something?
But procrastination aside, there are some amazing recipes out there for perfect cut out cookies and this is one of them. They have the perfect sweetness, brightened with a little addition of salt and even though the edges keep shape, the cookies are still soft and delicious inside.
You can ice them, put sprinkles on them and make them look really colourful but they are perfectly delicious without any icing.

This cookie dough requires chilling for one hour or freezing for 30 minutes. If you want your cookies to keep shape, don’t skip this step.

Take the butter and eggs out of the fridge and wait for them to become room temperature.
In a bowl, using a mixer or some elbow grease beat the butter until it becomes creamy. Slowly add the eggs and sugar and keep mixing so that the mixture is smooth.
Add the vanilla extract and almond aroma if using.
With a spatula, mix in the flour, salt and baking powder.

Roll the dough out on a piece of baking paper, cut the cookies out, take away the excess dough and roll more out on a new piece of baking paper. Continue until you have used up all of the dough. Stack the cookies on baking paper in layers, cover the last one with one more piece of baking paper and freeze for 30 minutes or chill in the fridge for an hour.
You can chill the dough in the fridge for the night, if you need to or you can freeze the cookies, or just a dough ball for later use.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.
Bake each sheet with cookies for 10 minutes.

This crumble is a delicious way to use up all these frozen blueberries you picked in the summer or bought in the store. It’s sweet, very full of blueberry flavour and so, so delicious when hot. You can always microwave it later if you have leftovers. But do you really think you’re going to have leftovers from this?

Nope.

Ingredients:

3 cups frozen blueberries

2 Tbsp corn flour

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup or around 120g butter, softened

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

In a bowl, mix butter, sugar and flour until they are combined and form a crumble – like texture.

Separately place blueberries in a casserole dish and mix corn flour and lemon juice in with them. You’re hoping to coat them with the cornflour, so they don’t end up being juice in the ready crumble.

Once mixed, cover the blueberries with the crumble mixture, place in the oven and bake for 20 minutes.

Sometimes, if the crumble still looks pale, I set the oven to grill function for the last five minutes, to see the crumble become golden.

Let the crumble set for 15 minutes before serving. That’s the idea anyway. We always eat it straight away while it’s still the consistency of a thick soup. Still delicious though!

These are delicious mint candies that are hard on the outside but melt in your mouth. They can be given as a gift or devoured at home. Either way they are addictive. They have a very nice old-fashioned feel to them and contain no weird ingredients.

Be careful with the peppermint oil. I used 6 drops of mine but it’s a good idea to use three or four first and check the flavour. The peppermint oil is extremely strong.

This is quite a big recipe. I managed to make 200 candies out of it and filled 5 jars. All worth it though as I can’t stop eating them!

Ingredients:

3/4 cup softened unsalted butter

1/2 tsp salt

6 cups icing sugar

3 Tbsp milk

6 drops peppermint oil

food colouring (optional)

Place butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and mix until light and fluffy. Once that happens, add salt, peppermint oil and food colouring if you’d like the candies to have a very smooth colour. If you prefer them streaky, add the food colouring at the end and knead it in by hand.

Next add icing sugar in portions and follow with milk.

Keep beating until the mixture is a uniform powder which packs immediately when you touch it.

Remove the bowl from the mixer and form the dough into long ‘logs’ with your hands.

Cut with the pizza cutter or knife to form little pillow shapes.

You can go ahead and press each one with a fork for an easy decoration but as you can see I skipped this step.

Very important: leave the mints out in room temperature overnight, so that they dry on the outside and become harder.

This cake is the definition of softness and comfort. That might be because I love milk and I drink it on its own or as cocoa. I add a lot of it to coffee and I can’t really imagine life without milk. So when I realised one day that again I bought a lot of milk and there is now 6 liters of it in the fridge, I started looking for ways of using more of it in cake. This recipe was born as a version of a hot milk cake. Recipes for hot milk cake can be found all over the internet but I tweaked mine to no end and added the irresistible peaches. I hope you’ll enjoy it because we certainly did and it disappeared quickly.

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 1/4 cup sugar

2 1/4 cup all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/4 cup milk ( I use 1% fat ‘light’ milk)

100g (a little less than 1/2 cup) butter

1/2 cup applesauce (you can use double the amount of butter instead if you have no applesauce)

2 tsp vanilla extract

a big can of peaches, which gives around 10 halves

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Place the peaches in the bottom of your baking tray, bellies up.

Put the eggs and salt in a bowl of an electric whisk and start mixing on high.

While doing that, slowly add all of the sugar and vanilla extract. Whisk until the mixture is light and turns white and not yellow from the yolks anymore.

Switch over to low speed and add the applesauce (skip this step if you’re using double butter instead).

I sift the flour and mix it with baking powder, just because I don’t want the now aerated mixture to lose its air.

Now, while the dough is mixing on low and you’re adding flour tablespoon by tablespoon heat the milk and butter in a saucepan.

As soon as the butter is melted start adding to the dough as well, alternating between flour and the buttery milk.

Once everything is added and mixed, pour the mixture onto the peaches.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. The stick test seems to work unless you jab a peach with your stick, so keep trying. 🙂

Enjoy and good luck fighting your family or housemates who will suddenly have so many things to do in the kitchen and will only ‘accidentally’ nibble on this cake.